Misc
Give Up Sooner
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
As a developer, how many times each day do you look something up online? I'm not talking about a simple piece of syntax, I'm talking about the things that are a bit harder to find. For example:
You're Not Qualified to Have an Opinion on TDD
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
One of the marks of a good senior developer is that they have lots of interesting opinions. After years of working on different software projects, they'll be able to passionately explain why they think MongoDB is ass, paired programming is no fun, and the GitHub CLI changed their workflow.
Programming types and (incorrect) mindsets
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
DHH, the creator of Ruby on Rails, Hey, Basecamp, and a few other things, recently wrote an article titled "Programming types and mindsets", and I just have to chime in on this one.
12 Codecademy Alternatives That Will Get You Where You Need to Go
by Natalie Schooner - Computer science educator and technical writer
Just last month, Codecademy was sold to Skillsoft for $525 million. Not too shabby, and entirely well-deserved if you ask me. I'll be straight with you, I love Codecademy. Maybe you're wondering why I'm opening with that in an article about its alternatives, but I want to start with the history so you can grasp what Codecademy alternatives are good for.
As a Developer, What Hardware Do You Truly Need?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Let's be real here: we live in an age where everyone and their dog seems to think they need the latest, most expensive gadgets to get anything done. But when it comes to learning how to code, do you really need that shiny, wallet-draining powerhouse of a machine?
Makefiles to improve your life
by Casper Andersson
During development you may sometimes notice you run a lot of commands to set up, build, test, and manage your project. Sometimes, these end up requiring several steps, or you have trouble remembering the exact command. One way to manage this is to set up aliases in your shell configuration. While this would work fine for yourself and for a single build system, it would not be possible to share it in a convenient manner.
Write on the Boot.dev Blog
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
We've just opened up the Boot.dev Blog to public contributions! We're really excited to see all the great stories that our readers and students will create.
Using GitHub Issues to Hack Together A Feedback System
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Boot.dev has been my side-project for the last couple of years now. Being a learning path for backend developers focused on quality over quantity, I knew early on that it needed to have a really tight feedback loop from students. We had (and still have) a Discord server where myself and the students hang out, and that worked okay at first. Unfortunately, Discord channels have a couple problems when it comes to issue tracking:
How Not to Ask for Help Online
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
I've spent an unhealthy amount of time online over the course of my life, and in the last couple years I've been managing a Discord server for people who are learning computer science. Like all online communities, we have ban, kick, and moderation policies so that we're not overrun with spammers and other non-contributors. However, I'm not perfect, and I have realized recently that we get a decent number of members who at first glance seemed like a spammer, but it turns out they just have no idea how to communicate online in a way that's useful to themselves and others.
Top 10 Communities For Learning to Code
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
The one thing that every programmer has in common, whether they've only ever implemented a "Hello World" program or they're considered a "senior" software engineer, is the need to continuously learn. New technologies, programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and conventions are constantly being introduced to the industry. As a beginner, it can be hard to suss out what you need to know to enter the profession, and once you're a proficient coder, it's tiring to constantly investigate trending topics in tech.
An Overview of Boot.dev's Full-Stack Architecture
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Because I've had several inquiries on this topic, I thought it would be interesting to publish some information on how the boot.dev website and platform work, and how I've organized all the technologies I'm using. I'll do my best to keep this list updated in the future as I migrate from older tools and technologies to newer ones, but assume that this might be a bit out of date by the time you read it.
The Best Product Managers Have The Worst Ideas
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
It's hard finding good product people. That fact is really a tragedy because they are probably the most important part of any product-focused organization. I think there is a misconception in the software industry that product managers have a good sense of "what users want", "what the next feature should be" or "ux design". In reality, I've come to believe that the best product managers aren't good at any of that, and they know it.
Well, We Might Have a Video Call for That!
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
This article contains some of my thoughts on communications for distributed teams and is a response to No, we won't have a video call for that! by Florian Hass. Read his article first if you haven't yet, he makes some great points!
16 Great Coding Challenges You Can Try Out
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
Coding challenges are a fun way to improve your coding quickly.
The 10x Meeting - Solving for Too Many Meetings
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Perhaps you've heard of the fabled 10x developer (or 10x engineer) - the one on the team that's 10x as productive as their average colleague. While many, including myself, doubt the existence of such people, I do think there are meetings that are 10x as productive as the average meeting. My goal in this article is to break down their properties so we can have 10x fewer meetings.
How I Organize My Local Development Environment
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
When I was just getting into coding, I was very disorganized. I would create a new text file in My Documents, work on it, never create a Git repository, accidentally delete it later, you get the idea. Nowadays I'm quite the opposite. To be honest, the thing that made me get my act together was the quite unpopular and now deprecated GOPATH that early versions of Go required developers to work in. I think it was the right move to not force that organization as a requirement, but I actually quite liked the method personally, and still use a version of it to this day.
View Git Tags with Semver Ordering
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
If you're like me, you wish all Git tags adhered to the Semantic Versioning standard. Unfortunately, Semver is just a convention, so Git tags can basically be any string of text. By default when you use the git tag command, your output will be in alphabetical order. Being a gopher, almost all the projects I work on are tagged according to Semver standards, which means the default output is fairly useless.
The Benefits of Gamified Learning
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Why was that adjustment to college classes so hard? Sitting through hours of lectures and PowerPoints can be challenging for even the most dedicated students.
NLP is Hard Because Even Humans Don't Agree
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
In my full-time role at Nuvi, I've been lucky enough to work on a team where we're able to push the boundaries in the natural language processing field. We built out several different "facets" that we score text on, including sentiment, emotion, vulgarity, tense, and currently, we're working on promotion detection.
The 8 Most Popular Coding Languages of 2026
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
How can you decide what the most popular coding language is? It's like trying to pick the most popular ice cream flavor - everyone has a favorite. The truth is that different coders prefer different coding languages for different reasons, and just when you think you can say a single coding language reigns supreme, a new one crops up, or an older one becomes relevant for a new application.
Top Web Development Programming Languages; A Comparison
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The software development industry is growing at a break-neck pace. Currently, there are close to 19 million software developers in the world, and this number is expected to double by 2030.
6 Things to Avoid When Contributing to Open-Source Projects
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
With #HacktoberFest being a thing, there has been an influx of devs desperately trying to contribute to their favorite Open-Source projects. Unfortunately, many of these pull requests have been a waste of time, with the maintainers ultimately unable to use the contributions. Maintainers don't want to waste their time reviewing bad PRs, and contributors don't want to waste their time writing code that will never make it into production.
Top 4 Coding Languages To Learn For Beginners in 2026
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Coding languages, tools, and frameworks are in a constant state of flux, improvement, deprecation, and popularity swings. Let's take a look at the top 4 languages for new programmers to learn in 2026.
Education's Shameful State of the Art
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Higher education had its problems before Covid-19. Now the crippling inefficiencies, backbreaking cost, and lack of alternatives are being forced into the spotlight. We're working on what will eventually grow into the alternative to overpriced universities and ineffective Bootcamps at boot.dev. In the meantime, let's take a look at education's biggest problems, and how we can solve them.
Practical Patterns for Technical Writing
by Ben Barten
Writing technical documents like API or architectural documentation which exceeds a simple flow diagram can be a daunting task. If you have some experience with technical documents, you will probably agree that there is nothing more frustrating than bad documentation.
